Article published in Manchester Evening News 11 March 2016

THEATRE director Annabel Arden has given Opera North, over the years, some of the best and most memorable productions I can remember in its illustrious record.

Her version of The Magic Flute was both deeply thoughtful and marvellously fantastical; her Return Of Ulysses and La Traviata were hugely effective dramatically, and her The Cunning Little Vixen created a wonderful make-believe world.

Now she’s tackling one of the big pieces of the late 19^th-century Italian ‘verismo’ style – Giordano’s Andrea Chenier, a tale of passion and heroism at the time of the French Revolution – beloved of tenors who can hit the high notes and audiences who long to hear them do it.

It comes to The Lowry on March 19, in a week which also sees Opera North revive their popular productions of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte and Donizetti’s comedy, L’Elisir D’Amore.

Royal Northern College of Music trained tenor Rafael Rojas has the title role (he was the gunslinger hero in Puccini’s The Girl Of The Golden West for Opera North in 2014 – a character first created by Caruso), and Dutch soprano Annemarie Kremer is his love interest, Maddalena (she was outstanding as Norma for the company in 2012).

“The music is incredibly exciting,” Annabel Arden told me. “Andrea Chenier was a real person, a poet executed for being anti-revolutionary, but in the opera there is woven in a love story – he meets an aristocratic young woman and they’re united by patriotism and passion.

“You could play it as a conventionally operatic story, but I looked at Chenier as an historical person and read his poetry in the original French. I and the designer, Joanna Parker, were fascinated by the idea of writing itself as what it’s about.

“The French Revolution was a time when everybody was a writer, a journalist or a pamphleteer. The whole idea of graffiti in public places was born then, and the tradition of ‘re-writing history’ came out of it, too.”

She says they’re challenging the common view of the revolution, and, as artists have always done, offering an interpretation of the history.

“Illica, the writer, was also the author for Puccini’s La Bohème, which is in ‘verismo’ style, too. You would think they were writing for film! It’s like a shooting script, where they’re using rapid cutting, and it’s come to be seen as old-fashioned.

“I’ve tried to make a style which is much more contemporary.”